Secret Supper: Obamas, Clintons dined at W.H. on March 1

3/8/13 9:59 AM EDT

President Barack Obama has been hosting a lot of high-profile dinner companions lately, but here's one guest list that didn't leak for a week:

On March 1st, the president, First Lady Michelle, former President Bill Clinton and outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton enjoyed a quiet, three-plus hour dinner in the private residence to celebrate Hillary's retirement from the administration, POLITICO has learned.

Details are scant, but people with knowledge of the event described the meal as "informal," featuring a "wide-ranging discussion" in which the former president apparently offered some second-term advice, including his experiences in engaging hostile Congressional Republicans.

Obama had planned his big push for bipartisan engagement prior to the dinner -- but Clinton has long favored a schmooze-and-sell approach.

Calls to Obama and Clinton spokespeople elicited the sound of crickets.

Aides in both camps say the relationship between the Obamas and Clintons has grown progressively more friendly over the past couple of years - more cordial than buddy-buddy -- and the current president was particularly grateful for the former president rousing keynote at the Democratic convention in Charlotte last August. At the same time, many former Clinton advisers have taken on positions of major responsibility in Obama's policy and political operations -- top staffers like Gene Sperling, Stephanie Cutter, Jennifer Palmieri and many others now play central roles.

Bill Clinton, as his wont, hasn't been shy about offering his two-cents on politics -- whether it was lecturing top Obama campaign officials on the best way to attack Mitt Romney last year or offering strategic foreign policy advice to President Obama during a quiet dinner the two presidents shared in New York about a year ago.

During a joint Obama-Hillary Clinton interview aired on "60 Minutes" shortly before she left Foggy Bottom, Steve Kroft of CBS asked Hillary Clinton about her political future -- and asked Obama if he would play any role if she planned to try for the top job again in 2016.

"You guys in the press are incorrigible," Obama said. "I was literally inaugurated four days ago. And you're talking about elections four years from now."

But he went on to lavishly praise the job she did at State:

"She also was already a world figure," Obama said. "To have somebody who could serve as that effective ambassador in her own right without having to earn her stripes, so to speak, on the international stage, I thought, would be hugely important."

During the sit-down, the former secretary chalked up lingering tensions between the Hillaryland-Obamaland camps to the sentiments of aides holding grudges from the 2008 campaign. But there have been significant moments of friction involving the principals too -- namely Bill Clinton's anger at caustic comments Obama adviser David Axelrod made about then-Sen. Clinton's support for the Iraq War.

During the '08 primaries, the former president also took offense at the Obama campaign's rejection of Clinton-era triangulation, and Obama's casting of his race against Hillary Clinton as a passing-of-the-torch moment of generational change.

But time - and foxhole necessity -- has made allies of the former adversaries. Bill Clinton, Obama aides have repeatedly said, was the single most effective surrogate the reelection campaign had in 2012. They credit Clinton's repeated trips to Florida in the campaign's closing days, in part, for Obama's narrow victory over Mitt Romney in the electoral-vote-rich Sunshine State.

Clinton has even come around to some of Obama's positions on Clinton-era initiatives:

In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Clinton this week threw his support to a repeal of the the Defense of Marriage Act into law, which he signed into law in a effort to appease Congressional Republicans.

"As the president who signed the act into law, I have come to believe that DOMA is contrary to those principles and in fact, incompatible with our Constitution," he wrote.